Category: PM Tips & Ideas
What is project cost management? It is a suit of activities for estimating, allocating, and controlling costs within the project. Project cost management allows determining and approving budget for the project and controlling spending. For example, in construction project cost management it is vital to estimate cost of building materials, equipment, salary of workers. In IT project cost management it is critical to estimate cost of software development, salary of IT staff and developers. Effective project cost management allows each project to be specific and unique because that project entails costs and requires specific funding. However, no matter whether you lead a software development project (IT project cost management) or construction project (construction project cost management), you should consider project cost management as a process that consists of the three key steps.
Project Charter is a primary document that states contains initial requirements for a project to meet the expectations of stakeholders. Formally, Project Charter is an agreement between an organization which is committed to producing a product/service and a customer which requests and receives the product/service. Practically, Project Charter is a planning tool that helps set obligations, rights and privileges for all groups and individual involved within a project.
Writing a statement of work (SOW) is an arduous task, and many projects were failed because of too vague, broad or generic SOW. The failure to properly develop and execute a statement of work is also the reason why project parties end up in a dispute. Let’s try to understand what SOW means and how to develop it properly.
In Part I, three basic responsibilities of the risk management team have been listed and described. In Part II, the rest two responsibilities will be outlined.
A risk management team (workgroup) is a separate and often independent unit within the project management team headed by the risk manager or the chief risk officer. It helps place a value on the project’s activities (such as procuring, communicating, controlling quality, staffing etc.), works out strategies to mitigate identified risks, applies risk management methodologies and risk analysis tools, and integrates insurance policies of treating prioritized threats with the project management team. The primary responsibility of the workgroup is to ensure that the project is provided with a complete risk management information system that ultimately determines how to control and oversee the project’s effectiveness and fulfillment. The team also approves risk management policies and defines their framework.
